Recently, Tianyajun has a post-95 friend Xiao Chen who has not yet been listed to plant grass, and he who is a few family treasures for various luxury cars on weekdays, just look at a few product pictures, he said that he was "fascinated at first sight" for this new car, this model is Changan's newly exposed UNI-V, which has also received one-sided praise on the Internet.
As the first coupe in the Changan gravitational sequence, why can UNI-V's styling design win the praise of discerning young consumers? Behind the excellent design, what unique secrets have been mastered by the designers of Changan Automobile? What implications can they bring to the design evolution of Chinese brands?
Recently, Changan Automobile released UNI-V design sketches and more technical details may allow us to better understand where the charm of UNI-V comes from.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > everything is about proportion</h1>
The famous 18th-century French architect Blondel famously said: "Beauty comes from measurement and proportion." ”
Indeed, whether in the field of art or industrial design, behind the exquisite design is often the proportion of exquisite proportions. When we analyzed the sketches of UNI-V using Fibonacci spirals that are widely used in photography, painting and other fields, we found that the popularity of this car was also not accidental.
When you place the spiral in front of the UNI-V sketch, you can see that the focus of the spiral line falls exactly in the area in front of the A-column of UNI-V.
Such a law also appears on the body of high-end coupes such as BMW 4 Series or Mercedes-Benz CLS:
And when we compare some of the compact popular car in the same way, we will find that their focus is mostly on the back of the A-pillar:
The biggest difference between the two designs is actually the different treatment of the dash to Axle distance.
In the field of automotive design, Dash to Axle, the lateral distance from the center point of the front axle to the lower edge of the A-pillar, is an important factor in making a car elegant and sporty. Many rear-drive luxury cars look very upscale at first glance, precisely because this distance is long enough.
At the same time, most front-drive vehicles have smaller engine compartment lengths, and the shorter Dash to Axle will make the design look mediocre.
But as a front-drive car, UNI-V's Dash to Axle is significantly longer than the average home car, forming a rearward shift of gravity, making the front of the car look longer visually, which is one of the key designs that highlight its sports coupe identity for UNI-V.
When we place the model on the rear of the car, the spiral line will not only form a tangential trend with the bottom of the wheel, the upper part of the wheel arch, and the back, but also the focus will once again fall on the rear part of the hatchback part of the UNI-V's excellent design.
After looking at some of the key dimensional parameters of the UNI-V, we were even more convinced that the designers were consciously doing their best to achieve the best body proportions for this product.
The first is the shaft length ratio of UNI-V.
The so-called shaft length ratio, that is, the ratio of wheelbase to body length. Through data comparison, it can be seen that the shaft length ratio of UNI-V has surpassed most sports cars of the same class, and is closer to the proportion of high-end luxury cars such as BMW 5 Series and Mercedes-Benz E-Class.
In addition to being better looking, a larger shaft length ratio also leads to more room for internal rides.
Another parameter is the aspect ratio.
The aspect ratio determines the longitudinal shape of the body, and a smaller aspect ratio means a lower body, a more stable center of gravity and body posture. However, designers also need to deal with a contradiction - as a sports coupe that needs to take care of home scenes, the height of the body has a greater impact on the head comfort of the people in the car, and it is impossible to reduce it indefinitely.
UNI-V data shows that in the case of a body height (1430mm) that is much more than the same level of Civic (1415mm), the designers have increased the body width to 1838mm, so that UNI-V finally reached an aspect ratio of 0.778, which is very close to high-end coupes such as BBA.
It can be said that it is precisely because of enough efforts in these proportions related to aesthetics that UNI-V will present a longer wheelbase, short front suspension and wide front end than its peers, thus creating a strong sense of sport and luxury car style.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > details highlight the high aesthetic</h1>
With a good body proportion to lay the foundation, the choice of design language and the polishing of details have become the key to the overall design of a car.
Changan Automobile named its new generation of design language "New Technology Wisdom Aesthetics", and technology and wisdom are the core of this new design language to achieve aesthetic goals. In UNI-V, both of these points are well expressed.
In the front part, the most striking feature of UNI-V is the use of a borderless grille design, which has the advantage of being in line with the trend trend, the area is large enough, and the various "organs (headlights, fog lights, lower bumpers, etc.)" are still harmonious.
Although today's cars generally pursue a large mouth design, the beauty of the three courts and five eyes is often broken, and there is a problem of imbalance in the proportion between the various parts. The use of a borderless grille allows UNI-V's visual center of gravity not to be firmly grasped in the grille area, but will be extended with the boundaryless design, such as the diagonal line of the grille extending into the headlights, and integrating with the headlight lines. In this way, the overall sense of harmony is significantly enhanced.
In detail, UNI-V's forward grille pattern selects angular triangular elements.
There is an interesting point of knowledge here – triangles are considered by scientists to be "the future form of the origin of the universe". It should be known that as early as the middle of the 19th century, the famous German mathematician Gauss proposed to make the forest scene into a huge triangle to attract aliens to meet the earth.
Compared with the shark nose of UNI-K, UNI-V has optimized the front face through the optimization of the profile, which also shows that Changan Automobile is also continuously optimizing this "new technology wisdom aesthetic".
The side beauty of UNI-V is also not only reflected in the proportions.
While getting rid of the traditional waistline modeling, UNI-V designers chose "V-shaped surface design" as the core element of the body side, with a curved profile, so that the side is full of power at the same time, adjusting the side proportions, so that the car does not look too heavy.
During the driving process, this set of V-shaped surfaces will also fully reflect the environment around the vehicle, thus forming a static and dynamic flow of beauty, making the whole vehicle more visually agile and technological, and the hidden door handle makes the flow of light and shadow more extreme, while reducing the wind resistance of the vehicle.
In the tail of UNI-V, on the basis of the through-type taillights, the designer further enhances the sense of technology through the inclined triangle element, the details are full, the edges are still raised, the three-dimensional sense is more intense, and this angular design also echoes the sense of movement of the lower skirt part very well.
Overall, UNI-V is almost impeccable in design details, and together with the exquisite proportions, it forms a natural beauty.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > the technical support behind aesthetics</h1>
Unlike pure artistic creation, the challenge of car styling design is not only how to make a refreshing shape, from beginning to end, designers need to take into account the limitations of a series of technical factors such as engine size, position, and vehicle center of gravity.
From this point of view, the designers of UNI-V are fortunate because the new "Ark Architecture", which represents the advanced technology level of Changan Automobile 4.0 era, provides unprecedented technical support for their boundless creativity.
UNI-V is the first sedan based on the "Ark Architecture".
According to the research and development details released by Changan, compared with the previous generation of products, the length of the new generation NE1.5T engine of blue whale equipped with UNI-V has been reduced by 13.5mm, and the center of the crankshaft has dropped by 12mm. At the same time, engineers optimized the power arrangement inclination from 7.5° forward to 10° backward.
As a result, the UNI-V was able to achieve a decrease in the height of the hood, which not only helped the designer to successfully create a swooping downforce posture, but also increased the driver's field of vision by 9%, and the reduction of the engine length and the improvement of the energy absorption efficiency of the front section of the body structure became the key to the compression of the front overhang length, laying the foundation for the UNI-V's wheelbase of up to 2750mm and the 0.588 axle length ratio of 0.588 ahead of its peers.
At the same time, the Ark architecture also reduces the powertrain position, the man-machine position, and the vehicle height, while creating a higher body stiffness, greatly reduces the weight of the upper body with structural optimization, and reduces the height of the vehicle center of gravity by 30mm compared with the previous generation platform model, which not only allows UNI-V to achieve a height-to-width ratio of 0.778, the shape is thicker, and the handling of the vehicle is improved through the reduction of the center of gravity.
These research and development efforts in the pursuit of the ultimate in technical details have become UNI-V's unique and high-value infrastructure at the same level, and even have great significance for the design breakthrough of the entire UNI series.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > summary</h1>
The emergence of UNI-V has undoubtedly brought the competitiveness of Changan Automobile's product line to a new level, and more importantly, this model marks that Changan Automobile is continuously achieving new breakthroughs in design, technology and other fields under the support of systematic architecture.
At present, UNI-V has planned to be officially unveiled at the Guangzhou Auto Show in the near future, and will be officially listed in 2022, it is foreseeable that under the attack of subversive innovation of Chinese brands such as UNI-V, the era of joint venture brands lying in the Chinese home car market will eventually be gone.